Organizers and performers are wild for Whoop-Up Days, the biggest family festival of the year in Lethbridge. The popular annual event averages about 7,000 people each year coming through the gates to check out a variety of attractions
“We’ve got about 130 floats registered for the parade (Aug. 23) and Rick Casson, our former member of Parliament, will be parade marshall and ambassador for Whoop-Up Days this week,” said Doug Kryzanowski, Exhibition Park manager of marketing, as he was tying up assorted loose ends for the event.
“We’re very pleased about it. (Casson will) add a touch of class to the event,” he said.
While Whoop-Up Days officially began with the parade on Tuesday morning, the first pancake breakfast of the week was on Sunday at University Drive Alliance Church. Throughout the week all over the city, there will be fundraising pancake breakfasts for a variety of causes including the Interfaith Foodbank, Cerebral Palsy Association, Woods Homes, the Boys and Girls Club, The Canadian Red Cross and many more. For details, locations and addresses, check their website www.
exhibitionpark.ca/index.php/general-events/2011-events/whoop-up-days/.
The gates open at 1 p.m. each day and close at 11 p.m., though entertainment and the midway continues through the night.

The west is alive and well at Fort Whoop-Up.
   Now, as history buffs come through the gates of the fort established in 1869 as a base for trade with the Indians, the visit is as much of a tracing of the family tree as it is a history lesson for some visitors.
“We’re starting to learn more and more about families that were here and it’s really interesting because we’re getting more and more visitors through the site that say ‘My great-grandfather was here (or) my great-great-grandfather was here,’” said Fort Whoop-Up executive director Doran Degenstein. “We’re starting to see all kinds of connections. We had a visitor earlier this month and their great-great-grandmother was a Sioux woman and one of her first mixed-blood children were born here in Fort Whoop-Up. There’s more and more of that stuff starting to come out and now it’s common knowledge that most of the traders here not only had a white wife at home, but they also had a prairie wife or a Blackfoot wife.”
In the old days, that subject was frowned upon, said Degenstein.
Nowadays, it’s essential.
“Those were significant contributions to the family,” said Degenstein. “Now all of a sudden there are descendents of those half-brothers and sisters that are interested in knowing who their relatives are. That’s one of the tasks that we’re looking at possibly having to address.”
In the meantime, Fort Whoop-Up continues to serve up a history lesson about southern Alberta back in the late 1800s, bloodlines or not.

A special event at the Owl Acoustic Lounge on Aug. 12 is a tip of the hat and a curtsy of the grass hula skirt to the beauty of the unsung ukulele. Even Eddie Vedder, an American musician and singer-songwriter who currently serves as the lead vocalist and one of four guitarists for the American alternative rock band Pearl Jam, released a CD of ukulele music.
But the humble ukulele is more than just a humorous, cute prop for a luau full of roast pig and grass skirts.
In the hands of a master such as “Manitoba Hal” Brolund, it can play beautiful blues.
And in the hands of even a novice, it can raise money for a good cause such as the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

The biggest dreams take baby steps to get started.
   So a group of local people who like the idea of living together in a community in an eco-friendly manner have started meeting regularly to discuss the future.
“We’re a group of people who  are interested in creating a planned, affordable and environmentally friendly housing community,” said Veronika Muendel, co-founder of Lethbridge Eco Co-Op Housing.
She and co-founder Gilles Leclair have been busy recruiting a dedicated core group of interested people interested in making this dream come true.
“It’s co-operative housing which would be based on environmentally sound principles,” Leclair said.